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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/22475218">and down came your innocence.</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account'>orphan_account</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Angst and Tragedy, F/M, Falling In Love, Grief/Mourning, Hurt/Comfort, Marauders Era (Harry Potter), Nothing is Beautiful and Everything Hurts, POV Lily Evans Potter, Past James Potter/Lily Evans Potter, Unhealthy Coping Mechanisms, i can't pace myself so this escalates a lot faster than it should, sirius black is a goddamn mess, so is lily honestly</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-01-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-01-30</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-04-28 11:08:07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>Not Rated</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>5,551</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/22475218</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>All it takes is Sirius saying <em>I love you</em> for you to turn into a messy suicide note and a five empty bottles of whisky.</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Relationships:</b></td><td>Sirius Black/Lily Evans Potter</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Comments:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>19</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>and down came your innocence.</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p>
  
</p><p>
  <b>and down came your innocence;</b>
</p><p>
  <strong>/</strong>
</p><p>Three days prior you're laughing. He tells you a joke (because he's a boy, because he's a laughing boy, because he's a laughing wicked boy with <strong>twigs</strong> in his pockets—) and for a moment you can pretend that there isn't a little devil hiding between his ribs, that there isn't something incredibly sweet and at the same time something incredibly bitter to it all. He's positively howling at a joke you don't quite get, and you want to tell him that it's not even amusing, but then his gaze seems to get warmer, and your heart floods suddenly with school-girl memories of when his chestnut eyes held honey and copper in them rather than the shadows they do now, so you smile (and he's such a little God unto himself, you think, a locust-eater, a fire-bender, a make-believe knight with stolen kisses on his lips and a sword in his hand—) and try to unearth the Gryffindor courage sleeping in your arteries.</p><p>Two days prior you're fighting. “It's just a standard Auror raid,” he assures, but tears trickle down his face in crooked bearings, smearing the light trace of a smile on his lips, twisting it into a heart-wrenching scowl usually reserved for Death Eaters, or Snivellus, or anyone except you, but he's not who he used to be, you admit. You watch his heated yelling with a muted gaze (but you want to scream and shout and beg for God to give your voice back) and an accepting shimmer in your eyes because you're not who you used to be either, you suppose, and that's okay. He gives you a small smirk, filled with honeyed affection and the familiar arrogance of his school years and that unspoken taunt of <em>there’s a reason I’m in Gryffindor, Evans.</em></p><p>And one day prior you're kissing, though to you it is so much more than that. His calloused fingers (they used to be smooth, he was a laughing wicked knight with twigs in his hands and a sword in his pocket, but—) find the hook of your bra, but you still his hand. Slipping down, you place your hands on his thighs, and you wonder if this is okay, and his throat throbs, and he grabs your face, and maybe this is how <strong>rapture</strong> feels (it's ridiculous, you know this, because that sort of ecstasy is for heroes and God's saints, and that's so far from what you are right now, but during this short little moment in which you are something more than just Lily Potter, you can pretend).</p><p>“You fucking minx,” mutters James (his eyes are lusty and passionate, and his hands are slick and moving, and the way his lips are crimson with desire is beautiful). “I fucking <strong>love</strong> you, Evans.”</p><p>He thrusts a hand into your hair and tugs until you moan, and his other hand strokes your body like you're a sculpture of glass, and through it all, “It's Potter now,” comes out only as a broken whisper of fidelity.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>You worry. Of course you worry, but he knows what he's doing, and he's always been (almost) unconquerable, and he's (almost) never lost a battle, and besides, it's just a small raid (butaccidentshappen).</p><p>You worry because he's late, and when the doorbell finally rings you feel relief flood through your veins as sudden and harsh as a cold wind breaking open your ribcage, and you push open the door, but it's not his eyes (his chestnut eyes streaked with <strong>gold</strong>) that greet you, and you try not to let the panic escape from your throat as a sob, try not to let the disappointment fall to the ground as a scream.</p><p>Sirius Black's eyes are like smoke: grey and steamy and full of humidity. They are cold, metallic, the sclera pristine and clear and untouched by that ugly shade of red. They are sooty like the last ashes of a fire, tossed up in the breeze, flecks of colour burning in them once in a while, dancing with the silver of an ocean the instant before dawn's first aureate rays strike its surface. </p><p>“Lily—”</p><p>“Stop,” you mutter, and you can almost feel the disbelief in your capillaries, thrumming in denial, vibrating as if to keep your blood warm and pressured and alive. “Just stop.”</p><p>He shakes his head. “There was... nothing. Absolutely nothing, but something happened — real fast — something — it was a fluke, Lily,” he whispers finally. “He’s fucking gone.”</p><p>You lean against the doorway, feel your soul fold into itself as you fight to hang the heartbreak in the sky, search for that Gryffindor courage inside you, laugh and then cry when you can't find it.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>There are many people at James's funeral. Of course there are. He was a hero, still is a fucking hero, he saved so many lives, so many innocent lives. He was brave, outstanding, living up to the chivalrous name of both his father and Gryffindor, his eyes like a knight in shining armour, his smiles like a prince saving his kingdom.</p><p>Nobody mentions he was<strong> nineteen.</strong></p><p>Peter cries, and Remus is too shocked to do anything than stare, but his eyes bleed yellow and his nails turn sharp, and you think he is absolutely enraged with grief. Sirius clenches his fists until blood-stained crescents paint themselves onto his skin as painful reminders of how stupid you've all been, how reckless and rash and bold, and Dumbledore reads the eulogy, a soft epilogue to the suffering brought to James by perhaps Circe, perhaps Morgana, or perhaps the golden acrylic God standing out the church you don't go to. You run over a million scenarios in your mind where you tip over the coffin, and you shove healing potions down his throat and hope this is just a sick joke, just a twisted recollection of his school-boy pranks, that he'll suddenly open the seal with a stupid grin on his face — <em>surprise!</em></p><p>When those don't seem probable you instead stare at his lifeless body with eyes dead as his, and you listen half-heartedly as everyone pays their respects, all the while trailing your eyes up and down his body, memorizing every curve even though you have traced them for years, your irises lingering briefly on his eyes, open and brown and beautiful and <strong>dead</strong>, staring into nothing, uncomprehending.</p><p>You're falling. Despite the lightness of your head and despite how you feel as if you're flying like a balloon without a tether, you're falling. You feel Sirius's hands try to lift you up, but you concentrate on <strong>falling</strong>, on pushing your weight into the ground. Maybe you'll sink through, maybe you'll go straight down into Hell, and maybe Lucifer will be kind to you because you still count the stars even though the brighest has fallen. Maybe he'll let James come back in exchange for your own life, let him walk among the living again, lead him home with a trail of holy water behind him.</p><p>That doesn't happen though, and you don't cry even as they take his body away and bury it into the ground like it's not the most precious thing in the world. There are no tears. There is no water left in your body.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>You go and sit by the Quidditch pitch more often than not. If you look hard enough, you can still imagine him riding around on his broom out there, performing, playing, throwing the Quaffle and winning the game, meeting you on the outskirts of the victory party, planting soft kisses down your neck that Marlene will ask about the next morning, leaving the faint trace of peach.</p><p>Peter and Remus visit once, but it's short-lived because they're not so sure what to say, and your throat is dry and devoid of all the words you've kept locked beside your heart for so long, so they leave. Sirius though — he stays quite often. You're not sure what to make of that, but he just sits next to you and doesn't say a word. One time he breaks his arm trying to pull a familiar stunt, but Sirius is no Chaser, and he's no James either. </p><p>“Am I dying?” you ask. He shakes his head. You blink, you swallow, you push another glass of Firewhisky into your lips even though it feels like hydrogen peroxide as it burns on your tongue. “Are you dying?”</p><p>He sighs this time, his grey eyes darting into something unseen to you. “No,” he says softly, “none of us are dying.”</p><p>You shift your gaze to the Quidditch pitch again, pull your knees to your chest, and try to brush away the lingering scent of his perfume. “I'm cold,” you mutter.</p><p>He hesitates for a moment, and then says, “Perhaps you should get some rest, Lily.” (It's summer and so very warm, and you're so very <strong>delusional</strong>, he doesn't say.)</p><p>Your eyes find their way back to him. “The bedsheets still smell of him,” you refuse, but he grabs your arm, and it makes sharp pain shoot through your wrist, but it's the most alive you've felt in a while.</p><p>His eyes glint strangely, and he flicks a small strand of his hair out of his face even though it just falls back over his eye with a casual elegance James never had. “We'll wash them,” he says after a while. “We'll clean them and spray perfume and fucking hell, Lily, I don't know, but we'll figure out <strong>something</strong>.”</p><p>(You wonder if this is what people mean when they say the heartbreak drives them insane. You miss him, and the longing is so undeniably there that pretending it isn't is just another way to die quietly.)</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>Sirius cannot cook, you realise. He stands in the kitchen and stares at the stove as if he's never seen one before, and he glances briefly at the fridge as if waiting for something to float out. You watch him struggle before you lose your patience and shove him out.</p><p>“You're utterly incompetent,” you tell him.</p><p>He pouts. “I'll have you know that I am perfectly competent,” he whines. “Just not with that incredibly strange Muggle contraption. What even is that? There are flames going out of it, Lily. Fucking <strong>flames</strong>.”</p><p>“It's called a stove, Sirius,” you explain, and then you sigh when all he does is tilt his head (just like James used to, that laughing wicked knight—). “Just tell me what you want.”</p><p>“Anything you do,” he says uncomfortably. “I'm supposed to be looking after you anyway."</p><p>“I'm making Macaroni &amp; Cheese,” you decide, but you're sure he doesn't even know what that is, so you wait for his disinterested ‘whatever’ to sound through the house before turning on the stove and letting yourself drown in memories.</p><p>(Breakfast at two, arched backs by four; you are 18% carbon, 18% diamond, and 18% stardust. <em>You will never be satisfied, </em>says your mother when you’re eleven and holding your first wand to your chest like the world will crumble into a dream if you don’t, <em>and</em> <em>this will never be enough.</em>)</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>You pour the pasta into a bowl, and you hand it to him. </p><p>He scowls. “You need to eat,” he admonishes.</p><p>You sit down next to him and stare disinterestedly. “I'm not hungry.”</p><p>He pushes it back toward you, and he glares, that blue flame of Black anger flaring in his eyes. “You need to eat regardless of that.”</p><p>You frown. “No, I don't. Why do I need to eat if I'm not hungry?”</p><p>He sighs. “You're tired, you're not sleeping properly, and you're overall just out of energy to do anything. You need to eat.”</p><p>You've always been adamant, but then he's always been persistent, so you give up arguing and try to suppress the feeling of your nauseous stomach and attempt to swallow without really chewing. You throw it all up afterwards. You know James would have stopped you from doing that, would have rubbed a soothing hand over your back and assured you that you're not slowly wilting at the petals, but Sirius just stands still behind you and averts his eyes.</p><p>“Now sleep,” he instructs.</p><p>“No.”</p><p>“You need to get sleep,” he snaps. “Merlin, Lily, you're overworking yourself by not even doing anything. <strong>Sleep</strong>.”</p><p>He gently grabs your arm and carries you over to your bedroom, but you grab the doorframe before you can go in, already the scent of him filling your nose, staining you red for regret. “I'll sleep on the couch,” you mumble, and you walk toward the lounge, still adamant but less so because you see Sirius's lips quirk upward.</p><p>“I'll stay over tonight,” he reveals, and that’s alright. "To, you know," <em>make sure you don't kill yourself, </em>“be sure that you're alright.”</p><p>You nod, and as you sleep you pretend you don't live in a world where ghosts exist. Maybe once you could have laughed away the fear, but that was in your schooldays, and you're not there anymore.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>“Wake up, Lily.”</p><p>You hope for a few seconds that it's all been a dream, an effect of the war and the deaths and the insufferable arrogance with which James had conducted himself because <em>I’m a bloody Gryffindor, Evans</em>, but reality hits you as a half-empty glass of rye whisky and a ton of regret.</p><p>Your mouth turns dry as you watch Sirius loom over you with metallic eyes untouched by lurid veins, and you briefly wonder what it will be like to kiss him and his cotton-soft lips, wonder what his wine-red blossom-pink tongue will feel like beneath yours, wonder whether he will taste like a cigarette between your lips or hydrochloric acid. He looks like he’s bursting with heartbroken desire, but you swallow your own lust and remember that it’s almost enough to make you smile.</p><p>“You’re still here,” you whisper. “You didn’t leave.”</p><p>He tries for a soft smile, but his teeth glint like knives (and you remember the daggers, the swords, the wands and the <strong>twigs</strong>—). “No,” he agrees, “I didn’t.”</p><p>His eyes as they caress your lips remind you of a sliced wound more often than not: glowing, dripping crimson in the night’s haze, smelling like lust and passion and just a bit of <em>there is no God here Lily, swear to me instead</em>. When you were small you liked to dream of meeting angels with soft white tunics and soft white halos, but Michael is the sin of pride as he guards the gates of heaven with wings made of electric wire and a halo of suffocated stars, and his thunder-struck voice leaves cracks on your pale skin every time he kisses you like you’re something more than a party favour.</p><p><strong>(...)</strong> </p><p>You sleep, you wake up, and then he’s leaving because <em>I need this too, Lily, my own time to grieve.</em></p><p>Fine. Fine, fine, fine.</p><p>“At least you told me,” you say, more to yourself than to him. “At least I know.”</p><p>Maybe this is why you hate moving on: the memories are always muddled with heartbreak and abandonment, flaked with how things used to be and how they are now. Nothing is easy like you think it is. Nothing is safe like you wish it would be.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>That night he goes home, and you can’t sleep. You bury your face in blankets that still smell of James, and you are dizzy with the recollections of him (because there was Lily and James before there was war, there was helpless lovesick desire before there was death).</p><p>You find yourself at his doorstep, half-dressed and apologetic. “I can’t,” you begin, something porous and permeable and at the same time heavenly in your eyes. “He’s everywhere, and then he’s nowhere. I dream about him and we’re fine, things are fine, but when I open my eyes there’s nothing but a horrifying absence of him and I just bloody <strong>can’t</strong>.”</p><p>The purple bags beneath his eyes remind you of little devils, and you don’t know whether you come for him or his solidity, don’t remember that you’re honeycombed and sieve-like, haunted and empyrean and a Renaissance girl walking upon a war of gods. Who if you scream out would hear you among the hierarchy of angels? Who if you pray would hear you beyond the asphyxia and suffocation?</p><p>“So what do you want to do?” he asks, and you think you can hear James’s voice asking you the same thing, his (dead) hands tracing down your neck, his (cold) lips planting promises on your collar, his (fading) breath like an autumn wind, <em>What do you want to do now that I’m dead, Lily?</em></p><p>“Stay here,” you say desperately. “Please, I can’t stay at that bloody house anymore, Sirius, <strong>please</strong>.”</p><p>He sighs and looks at you helplessly as if his mind is already made up. “Yeah. Yeah, okay.”</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>He likes having you around, this you can tell by the gentle manner by which he handles you. He cooks, he cleans, he pretty much leaves you alone, and you’re fine with that, except that you’re also really not.</p><p>You’ve been with him for two and a half weeks when you come into his bedroom at night, climb next to him from beneath the blankets, press your cold chest to his stomach, watch his eyes flicker open.</p><p>“What are you doing, Lily?” he asks, shifting away to the other side of the bed. “What’s wrong?”</p><p>“I was lonely, I suppose,” you whisper softly. “By myself even though you’re right here. And cold,” you add. “I’m always so very cold without you.”</p><p>“No, Lily,” he says. “No. I won’t do this to him. It isn’t right. Bloody hell, it isn’t <strong>right</strong>. No. <strong>No</strong>.”</p><p>“What do you think this is?” you ask, blinking at him in a golden river of both regret (because the trajectory of your relationship has never been a straight line, it’s crooked, broken—) and molten sacrilege. He doesn’t answer you, he doesn’t even look at you, but you can imagine how it will feel when he finally turns around and holds a hand to your cheek, shedding a few tears that taste like honey, writing apologies on your lips with his tongue. You smile. “This isn’t anything, Sirius. I’m tired, I’m cold, and my husband is dead. This isn’t anything.”</p><p>This is nothing, yes, but this is also everything. This is temptation, the shape of his mouth as he leaves your body tingling with lust and desire and everything for which you used to thrive. This is a gift. This is a sunset painted above you in a liquid ombré of pink while he hangs your heartbreak in the sky, and this is <strong>euphoria</strong>. This is shattered porcelain innocence, a short red skirt tight around the edges and flowing at the brims with the dazed fluttering of a butterfly, rusty fingertips and molten-iron kisses, being pressed against a bathroom stall. But this is not <strong>love</strong>, this is not <strong>want</strong>.</p><p>He kisses you until you can’t breathe, until the asphyxia crawls up your throat, and then lies back down next to you. Fine. Fine, fine, fine. That’s fine.</p><p>This is nothing.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>He stays with you every night. There’s a red stain on your neck where his lips brush against your skin, and you think the contact leaves marks on your soul, a stagger in your step, and suddenly it’s James rather than Sirius, chestnut eyes glinting like blades in the moon-laced night, his abandonment smelling like Chanel hand-cream and that same acrylic God still standing outside the church you’ve learned to pray to.</p><p>The way Sirius smiles at you is all danger (the way James smiled at you was all Gryffindor courage and thunderstruck yearning), something satisfied aching to push through his unwilling facade, suppressed behind a wall of which is crafted by the tears in your eyes. It blazes in his pupils instead, kindles in the way he looks at you, and you’ve never understood the concept of tall boys with messy hair and deep voices until this moment in which your hands are tangled in his hair and his clothes are in your room, and then your world narrows into a pinprick of light that’s all him.</p><p>You still haven’t gotten over it. You still haven’t cried, still haven’t stopped seeing James in every empty hallway of your heart, dark and grinning and your laughing wicked boy, talking to you over the murky shine of your yellow bedlight.</p><p>One time you push your nose into Sirius’ chest and inhale, but all you get is Firewhisky, a weathered leather jacket, and burning wood. “You don’t smell like him,” you say.</p><p>He stares into your eyes. “I’m not him,” he says, but sometimes you forget.</p><p>You close your eyes and let him think you’ve gone to sleep.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>“This was a mistake,” he tells you. “I am so lucky to have touched you like this, Lily, but this was a fucking mistake.”</p><p>(“He would forgive you,” you don’t say. “He would bloody kiss you with his angel eyes and tell you that it’s okay, but that won’t mean anything to you until you realise that you deserve to be forgiven.”)</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>One day a month after his death you walk into his apartment with two plastic bags filled with alcohol.</p><p>“Celebrating something, Evans?” he asks. “Throwing a party?”</p><p>You shake your head and say, “Not exactly. I’m just getting drunk. Did you know that I’ve only done that once? James used to drink all the time, and it always looked like a good time, but I never tried it because I had to watch over him, that irresponsible prat, and the only time I ever really got so sloshed was on my eighteenth birthday, and the next morning I swore I’d never do it again.”</p><p>He refuses the shots you offer him, but you watch as his fingers still somehow find the bottle of gin even as his mouth spills protests, watch as he drinks himself into an endless winter with a golden hourglass of vodka in his hands.</p><p>(You think about heat as his eyes fill with tears. You dream about gold juice in your blood and little devils flying out his ribs into caves where they belong, buried in moonlight and starsong.)</p><p>You’re a lightweight, he’s not. He gets dazed, you get gin soaked. In your dreams you wear a white gown filled with hand-picked flowers, except this time you kiss outside a church the best man rather than the groom, and when the wedding bells ring above you like stars you say, “I’ll fight for you,” and keep your promise.</p><p><strong>(...)</strong> </p><p>“He was only nineteen,” he says flatly. “Why did he have to die?”</p><p>You take a drink, grimace, and look away. “I’m sorry. I’d bring him back if I could.”</p><p>“Really?”</p><p>“Anything for you.”</p><p>Maybe if you weren’t so drunk you wouldn’t have said it, but you’re plastered and he’s dizzy, and matters of the heart require time.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>You wake him up, and as his eyes flutter open you think of James’s irises — alight, manic, burning, <strong>burning</strong>. You feel his arms around your shoulders, your hips, your legs, your neck, your chest.</p><p>Sirius is tender as your (dead) golden knight, arms as soft, tongue as warm beneath yours, and he unearths a part of you James did not, fills a space your husband no longer does. Yet his hands, his fingers, calloused from wands and swords and stars, unearth memories only of chestnut eyes and wandering hands and the trail of fire they left on your lips, and you remember how it was to see him <strong>dead</strong>—</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>When you were with James, the photographed remnants of an old forgotten life never fell from the wall on a graceless Sunday morning, and the skies were always your favourite shade of blue.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>Both of their mouths dance with the same rhythm, with the same restraint and careful worry and desperate lust coming upupup from an endless chasm of endless love, and—</p><p>“Stop!” you yell at him, pushing away a nineteen-year-old boy who is not James, feeling cold wind rush from between your bodies and into your eyes and burningburningbur<strong>ning</strong>. “This isn’t right. This will never be right!”</p><p>(You still can’t explain why you did what you did, why he didn’t do what he perhaps should have. All you wanted was to once again play ghost with him on highways and sip bourbon as the wheels screech and bend and <strong>break</strong>—)</p><p>“But it is right,” he insists, and you’re standing suddenly on a cliff lined with hyacinths, and the young little boy in front of you isn’t Sirius, isn’t a broken-bone reflection of brown hair and chestnut eyes. It’s James, handsome and heavenly, your perfect man with dark eyes and messy hair, your laughing wicked knight, and he looks as stunning as he had on the wedding night, and it’s Sirius that’s dead, not him.</p><p>You try to jump off the cliff, but James pulls you back and kisses you like you’re seventeen again. The benefit of being dead is, apparently, this.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>Your heart is blue and sapphire and at the same time ocean green with all the tears you’ve cried, a running river swirling in silent circles, the soft whisper of fire in your veins, making dusk bloom in your eyes, travelling nowhere.</p><p>James used to lay his wasteland head on your lap, used to tap his fingers on your knees and let his hands sing a tune you’d heard before but had forgotten to remember. Kissing him was like running out of sin to subtract from your name, and you were always seventeen when you were with him, always Lily instead of Evans, always young and wild and free, so lucky to have a beautiful boy like him, so lucky to be in love.</p><p>(Kissing Sirius is like sex on the wrong end of a knife, and he won’t love you like James loved you, but he loves you.)</p><p><strong>(...)</strong> </p><p>It was on a late December night that James Potter called you his, and it tasted like ambrosia on your tongue, and Sirius laughed and called you his sister-in-law, and you laughed with him until your lungs collapsed into themselves and the oxygen snuffed out like a wisp of smoke, and now eight months later your skin is peeling from your bones as your days and nights become perfumed with his absence.</p><p>You remember swearing to the acrylic God outside the church that you would be righteous. The things you’ve done, Sirius’s seductive whispers — they come to you in the middle of the night and scream <em>you lied, you lied, you lied.</em></p><p><strong>(...)</strong> </p><p>“Stop.”</p><p>“Stop?” you ask. You tuck a strand of hair behind your ear, blink, push another one of Sirius’s cigarettes in your mouth, and exhale. “Stop what?”</p><p>Sirius looks at you, looks at your eyes and hair and lips and mouth, but you get the feeling he wishes you were someone else. “Stop coming back. Stop making me want you. Dammit, Lily, there is no universe where this is acceptable, you used to understand that!”</p><p>“Things change. I’ve changed.” The tight golden rope of regret is wound around your eyes and your heart, but there are walls between who you are and who you were.</p><p>“No, Lily.” His voice is soft and delicate and when you blink the tears are gone. “You think you’ve changed, think you’ve stuffed enough of him in the cupboard under your bed that you can pretend you’re a modern day woman with a strong constitution, but the truth is that he’s dead and you’re not, and you miss him so much you can hardly breathe.”</p><p>You stare at him, stare at the man who made you into half a person and then tore down your bones just to feel something again, and you could turn away, could take your things and leave and go back to that goddamn house that still smells like James, but instead you smile. “I used to think that he took the sun with him when he left,” you admit. “But now I realize that it’s my own fault for giving so much of myself to him.”</p><p>And it takes nothing more than the silence of one minute for Sirius to press you against the wall with lustful hatred in his eyes. It’s things like this (the arguments, the fights, telling him how much you fucking hate him) that really make you feel alive because you lose some, you win some, and you still come up empty.</p><p>
  <strong>(…)</strong>
</p><p>“You cut your hair.”</p><p>“I did,” he agrees.</p><p>You smile and lean back and pretend you can’t see James in the way his hair spikes upward messily. “I like it. Makes you look like a pretty little boy.”</p><p>He kisses you instead of responding, and every bite on your neck is a goddamn gift. Every time he throws you onto the bed and sucks on your skin until it’s a blistering purple bruise is another moment during which the emptiness in your heart diffuses out of you as this sense of holiness seeps in. Every time you wake up to his eyes hovering over you and your vision doesn’t flash immediately to a broken body cold to the touch and <strong>rotting. </strong>Every time he laughs and drags his nails across his back, and you scream, and he loves it, loves every time you moan, loves every time you beg. Every time he stands by your door like an angel in red, wings of cotton and halo of sunlight. Every time he kisses you in front of Marlene, or Dorcas, or even Remus and Peter. It’s all a gift.</p><p>Sirius, you think, is more of a trick than a treat.</p><p>
  <strong> (…)</strong>
</p><p>“What would you do,” asks Sirius, “if he weren’t dead?”</p><p>And you nearly choke on the cigarette in your mouth as he idly watches the smoke vanish into the cold air. “What?”</p><p>“You heard me.” He looks at you carefully, looks at the way your cheeks hollow out as you take a drag and blow it toward him. “What would you do if he weren’t dead?”</p><p>You shrug, but your shoulders have never quite felt so heavy. “I’d kiss him,” you say flatly because <strong>why the bloody hell are you asking me this, Sirius, don’t you already fucking know what I’d do? </strong>“I’d run up to him and kiss him like I’m running out of time because I already have before, and I just need to fucking kiss him again.” The cigarette suddenly tastes less like calm nerves and a lot more like betrayal. “I’d bring him home, make him is favorite cup of tea, take the memories out of the cupboards I’ve stuffed them in, and I’d pretend he’s never left.”</p><p>Something slithers into Sirius’s face, and it <strong>scares </strong>you because you don’t think you’ve ever seen his grey eyes so goddamn dark. “Am I not enough?” he asks.</p><p>You laugh, swallowing the fear. “You choked me out of my goddamn mind, Sirius.” He stares at you, and you sigh. “No, you are not enough.”</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>Sirius is more of a mess than you are, you start to realize, but the feelings you get when you're with him—those throbbing sensations of <em>yes Lily our love is heaven, our love is bloody Aphrodite and lust and passion, and our love is <b>God—</b></em>you don't think you can ever give those up. You are stained with heartbreak but bright as starlight and claiming as temptation. You are crawling out a black hole of grief, eyes closed for always, seeing only what's inside you.</p><p>Because it's dark and sad and dangerous there, but Sirius says what's outside is worse.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>You finally open your eyes on a graceless Saturday night, and you realize that Sirius <strong>lied.</strong></p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>Your heartache is still there in the end, is still there in the way Sirius looks at you and tells you that <em>James is gone, Lily, pray to me instead.</em> It's a bubbling darkness foaming at the edges of your fingers until it overflows like a river bursting at the seams, ink mixing into burning coal and then melting into a soft ebony drifting to the brims of your soul. It's bitter, vile, so terribly nauseating on the tip of your tongue, screaming so close to the words stuck in your throat, so close to the unspoken good-byes, and it's <b>numb</b>. But love is god and chaos and <strong>strength, </strong>and the love between her and Sirius is just a mix of unhealthy coping mechanisms and a crooked relational trajectory.</p><p>
  <strong>(...)</strong>
</p><p>All it takes is Sirius saying <em>I love you</em> for you to turn into a messy suicide note and five empty bottles of whisky. </p><p>You're translucent—a porcelain girl with glass shards on her fingertips and a plastic rope around her neck. You'd dreamt of being more honey-combed, had wanted to be a black soaring star, a comet tearing open the sky, or perhaps just a small warm-chested piece of armor. Now you're a bullet hole in your chest with the whisper of <em>I love you too</em> on your lips.</p><p>Yes, Sirius choked you out of your goddamn mind, promised you the world, fed you a goddamn lie. And if he won't go to avenge the brokenly lost soul you killed, then you will.</p>
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